Aadhaar may present 'interesting use cases' in the future: Facebook India MD

India retains its position as Facebook's second largest market with 166 million monthly active users (MAUs) in the country.Kim Arora | TNN | November 24, 2016, 09:28 IST

Umang Bedi is the managing director for Facebook's India and South Asia markets. He joined the social networking giant in July this year, after a five year stint at Adobe Systems where he had a similar role.

On Wednesday, Facebook India announced its latest user statistics for Q3 2016. India retains its position as Facebook's second largest market with 166 million monthly active users (MAUs) in the country. This was up from 125 million MAUs in Q1 2015. North America (USA and Canada) take the top spot. Bedi spoke with about the digital growth in India.

Your Q3 announcement presentation made a reference to the growth of Aadhaar. How is Aadhaar relevant to Facebook?

Aadhaar is a digital identity similar to a social security framework in the US. With UPI (Unified Payments Interface), it's enabling digital payments. It's not relevant from that perspective.

But if a person has an identity on Facebook and has the ability to hook on to a third party framework for payments it really is a seamless transition.

Today banks are allowing you to authenticate with an Aadhaar digital identity instead of an ATM pin. That is a use case of Aadhaar to remove cash. Aadhaar is just a secure identity. It's not linked. Facebook is a real identity of people. But over time there could be interesting use cases that emerge.

Use cases like?

It's hard to predict at this point. It really depends on the app innovation we see in the market.

Something like buying directly through Facebook?

In the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand, we have launched marketplaces, which allows users to trade with each other. And over time that would drive, or there would be connectivity of marketplaces in the rest of the world as well.

Facebook says it wants to be a "trusted" and "loved" company. Has the user perception after the WhatsApp data-sharing announcement had an impact on that?

Facebook as a company understands that in the software business we have to have complete transparency. Whether it was us making clarifications on our video metrics, or it was clarifying what our terms of service were, we've always had an open stance. That's the beauty of Facebook. From a business standpoint we haven't seen anything (any impact) at all.

How do measure local content in local languages in India on Facebook?

What we're seeing is as we're adding language, as we're adding relevant content in those languages in the genres that matter - the genres largely fall into ABCD (Astrology, Bollywood, Cricket, Divinity) - the time spent in engagement is getting far better on the platform.

How are you moving forward with the media and publishing partnerships in India?

Media partnerships are really huge for Facebook. We are in fact a discovery platform driving traffic. We're working with large number of media companies with content partnerships, and with advertising partnerships.